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Subject: 
Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date: 
Fri, 9 Feb 2001 21:02:01 GMT
Viewed: 
182 times
  
Dave Low wrote:

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette isn't exactly a rigorous scientific journal, so
the inclusion of this article shouldn't be taken to equal legitimacy.  In
addition, Dr. Michael Behe's theory of intelligent design does nothing to
explain where the intelligent designer came from, and he also seems
uninterested in the theory of punctuated equilibrium, among others, since
his comments come across as a refutation of basic Darwinian evolution rather
than current theory.

Maybe Chris Tracey (or someone else) can explain this a bit better, but I think
it's important to point out the main flaw in "intelligent design". To take
Behe's mousetrap analogy: it's true that half a mousetrap isn't much of a
mousetrap. But there's plenty of other useful things you can do with a piece of
board, or a spring, or a sliver of metal. And if you juggle them around for long
enough, picking those arrangements that do something vaguely interesting, you
could well end up with a mouse trap.

I realise the limits of taking an analogy too far...but since you
already did it.....what you've just said is still intelligent design.
What are the chances of a moustrap forming if you put all the parts into
a box and shake it - that's not having intellignet design.

He also disregards the possibility of biological scaffolding. If you look at a
cake, it can be hard to imagine how it came to be made out of flour, eggs, milk
etc. Maybe it just appeared? But when you see the finished cake, you don't see
the stove, spoons, and bowls that were needed to make it.

I love this example.  I see you conveniently left out "the chef
(baker?)" in your list.  Without any "thing that is intelligent" to
create the cake, you'll never have a cake....even if you wait for 4.5
billion years.  That scaffolding you list is useless without somebody to
use it!


--
-TiM
NB, CA
http://echofx.itgo.com
t_c_c@yahoo.com
3ch0fx



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
 
(...) Repeatedly shaking such a box is simply re-randomization. If somehow you could discard every faulty physical combination of the elements and preserve the useful ones (as traits are discarded or preserved through evolution) your chances at (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
  Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
 
(...) The breaking point with both analogies is that they refer to human-invented artefacts (leading to the spurious conclusion that the universe is _necessarily_ a God-invented artefact). Re the scaffolding, I can give an example from embryology. (...) (23 years ago, 10-Feb-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: In the interest of full disclosure...
 
(...) Maybe Chris Tracey (or someone else) can explain this a bit better, but I think it's important to point out the main flaw in "intelligent design". To take Behe's mousetrap analogy: it's true that half a mousetrap isn't much of a mousetrap. But (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

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